“It’s Really Such a Miracle” – Actor Rob Huebel Opens Up About Welcoming his First Child at Just 26 Weeks of Pregnancy

Hollywood actor Rob Huebel, and his wife Holly, welcomed their first child, a daughter Holden, on the 28th of September 2016 after his wife went into pre-term labor.

Holden was born at just 26 weeks, weighing only 1 lb., 15 oz. She spent 117 days in the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The family just arrived home about 2 weeks ago and the proud dad admits to being “fully exhausted.”

In an Interview with People, Huebel, shared the experience prior to the birth of his daughter and after her arrival.

Read excerpts from the interview below:

Going into labor so early must have been frightening. What was the moment like when Holden was born?

“My wife yelled, ‘She’s perfect!’ Which I thought was pretty awesome. I can’t talk about it without getting emotional. As soon as she was born, a team from the NICU took her and started running tests to make sure she was breathing on her own.

They put her in a little isolette, which looks like an incubator. We actually weren’t allowed to hold her for about two weeks because she was just too little. You can reach in and kind of touch her and put your hand on her, but they wouldn’t let you take her out or hold her.”

How emotionally tolling was it on you to leave your baby at the hospital every night for 117 days?

“It never got easy. It’s really, really hard and it’s emotionally really draining because every instinct that you have is to stay there and to be with your child.

It never got easier, especially toward the end, you just want to get out of there. So it’s really hard to leave. We thought about doing a jailbreak, but ended up opting against it.”

And then you were finally told you could take her home.

“That brought on a whole different rush of emotions and fears, it becomes a whole new type of terror. You become comfortable with a certain type of terror when you’re in the NICU because you’re so stressed out and so scared about the progress of the baby. The new fear is that I don’t want to screw it up now. I don’t want to sneeze on her or something.

I think I drove about 10 miles an hour on the way home. I really thought I was going to get pulled over for going too slow. I was like, ‘I’ve got my baby in the car! We just spent 117 days in the NICU!’ It’s really crazy.”

Now that she’s home, what’s your favorite thing about being a dad?

“There’s so much, and I’m such a young inexperienced dad. My favorite thing is really how much closer my wife and I became throughout this experience.

When you’re expecting a baby, there’s a lot you can plan for, but when it happens early you just have to jump into it. Whatever plans you had, everything goes out the window.

It’s just brought us so much closer together, on a level that I did not understand or expect at all. My wife has just been such a bad a** about the whole thing. She’s exhausted all the time, but she’s just been a real rockstar.”

Finally when asked about how his beautiful daughter is doing, he said:

“She’s doing really great. At the end of the day, it’s really such a miracle. You see this tiny little vulnerable helpless thing come out. They’re so small. And now we have this baby that’s almost 10 lbs. and she’s able to do everything a full term baby can do. It just really takes your breath away.”